Radio Sohemia

Fellow writers and Soho veterans, David McGillivray and Max Décharné, discuss Soho’s roughly two-hundred-and-fifty-year association with sexual transgression, with commercialised sex in its many varieties, and with sexual slang. As far back as the late 1700s, the area played host to brothels and flamboyant nightlife. It also provided a home to sexual nonconformists such as Giacomo Casanova and the cross-dressing diplomat, soldier and French spy, the Chevalier d’Eon. Soho’s association with sex persisted through to the twentieth-century when the brothels were joined by pornographic bookshops, smutty cinemas, clip-joints, peepshows, and strip-clubs. Even now, in the wake of more than two decades of intensive gentrification, the link between Soho and sex persists not just in folk-memory but in the flourishing nightclub and gay scenes.

Acclaimed writer Iain Sinclair, many of whose books have been inspired by walking back and forth across London, gives a never previously performed talk about how this can be “an instrument of enlightenment and resistance”. In keeping with the 2026 London Festival of Architecture's theme of belonging, Iain will also be musing on how certain buildings and patterns of buildings influence and inform our lives.

This is a recording of a talk that was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Fitzrovia Noir, the London Festival of Architecture, the S.S. Robin, the Tommy Flowers Foundation, and The Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust.

In conversation with the biographer Keiron Pim, the broadcaster, journalist, and Blitz Club veteran Robert Elms reminisces entertainingly about this era-defining venue and its flamboyant clientele.

This is a recording of an event that was was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Fitzrovia Noir, the London Festival of Architecture, the S.S. Robin, the Tommy Flowers Foundation, and The Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust.

Historian Debra Kelly chats with Sohemian Society co-founder, Marc Glendening, about the long and sometimes surprising history of French restaurants in London. As well as being the author of “Fishes With Funny Names”, Debra is Professor Emerita in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Westminster.

Architectural historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, author of “The Buildings of Soho”, shares his thoughts on the area's architectural past and his fears for its future.

Acclaimed historian and biographer Helen Fry joins archivist Ross MacFarlane to discuss Helen’s groundbreaking research into the White Lady/theClarence Service, a Belgian intelligence network that provided MI6 with crucial information during both the First and Second World Wars.

Crime novelists Jake Arnott and Cathi Unsworth chat about Jake's more than two decade-long literary career. Their conversation inevitably features “The Long Firm”, which was adapted into a hit BBC drama series. He and Cathi will also be discussing his latest novel, “Blood Rival”, a psychological thriller that borrows from the life of the gangster and road rage killer Kenneth Noye.

Geraldine Norman, widow of the writer Frank Norman, joins Joe Daniel, Frank’s grandson, for a discussion with writer/musician Max Décharné about the underrated author of books such as “Banana Boy” and “Stand On Me”. Joe was the driving force behind the recent republication of “Soho Night & Day”, the classic portrait of 1960s Soho – a book that features text by Frank and high contrast black and white photos by Jeffrey Bernard, someone better-known for his journalism and taste for booze.

Andrew Smith, the journalist and bestselling author of “Moondust”, talks to historian Matthew Worley about “Devil in the Stack” – Andrew’s latest nonfiction book. It’s a genre-defying part memoir, part history, and part impassioned essay about computer code and the ways in which it’s reshaping the world and humanity.

Supported by the Heritage National Lottery Fund, the Tommy Flowers Foundation, and Fitzrovia Noir.

“Guardian” staff writer Patrick Barkham chats with Ross MacFarlane about “The Swimmer”, Patrick’s appropriately unconventional biography of Roger Deakin. Abandoning his lucrative career as a 1960s Soho advertising executive, Deakin bought a ruined house in rural Suffolk and then reinvented himself first as a documentary film-maker and finally as the author of the bestselling memoir, “Waterlog”, which sparked both the fashions for nature-writing and so-called wild swimming.